ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Team Unloads on DeSantis Using Left-Wing Sources, Claims His Record in Florida is One of ‘Misery and Despair’ Debra Heine

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/21/trump-team-unloads-on-desantis-using-left-wing-sources-claiming-his-record-in-florida-is-one-of-misery-and-des

Former President Donald Trump ramped up his attacks against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday, releasing a campaign statement claiming the popular governor’s record in the Sunshine State is “one of misery and despair.”  In a press release titled “The Real Ron DeSantis Playbook,” Trump provided a long list of reasons why Florida “continues to tumble into complete and total delinquency and destruction,” and argued that it has become one of the least affordable states to work, raise kids, and retire.

“The real DeSantis record is one of misery and despair,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. “He has left a wake of destruction all across Florida and people are hurting because he has spent more time playing public relations games instead of actually doing the hard-work needed to improve the lives of the people he represents.”

On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump on Friday also shared a number of polls showing him far ahead of all of his potential GOP competitors.

The attacks come amid speculation that DeSantis is planning to launch a 2024 run for president in the coming weeks.

According to Florida Voice reporter Brendon Leslie, the Trump campaign sourced far-left Florida blogger Jason Garcia for its anti-DeSantis talking points. Garcia regularly trashes the conservative governor from the left on his Substack and on social media.

The Trump Campaign linked to a Substack post from Garcia who argued the governor raised taxes by more than $1 billion during his first term, although Garcia went on to note that the governor cut taxes by “more than $4 billion overall.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Just When Dem Debates Would Have Been Interesting, DNC Says There Will Be No Debates By Robert Spencer

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/04/21/just-when-dem-debates-would-have-been-interesting-dnc-says-there-will-be-no-debates-n1689234

Well, this is disappointing news. The Washington Post reported Thursday that “the national Democratic Party has said it will support Biden’s reelection, and it has no plans to sponsor primary debates.” It’s understandable: the Dems have a president, of sorts, and so they’re counting on the power of incumbency to help their superannuated kleptocrat get over the top again. However, it’s also immensely disappointing, because after years and years of Democratic presidential debates being dreary displays of candidates trying to out-socialist one another, 2024 Democratic primary debates would have actually had something to offer.

Biden has two challengers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson. When Kennedy announced his candidacy on Wednesday, USA Today reported that RFK immediately had the “support of 14% of voters who backed President Joe Biden in 2020,” according to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll. Williamson had 5%, and another 13% were undecided. USA Today noted that “that is surprising strength for a candidate who has a famous political name but is now known mostly as the champion of a debunked conspiracy theory blaming childhood vaccines for autism.”

USA Today’s confident use of the word “debunked,” however, can’t mask a growing suspicion among an increasing number of Americans that the authorities aren’t being honest with us. The COVID vaccine debacle, with what was originally touted as a single shot that would protect you from a deadly disease becoming multiple shots and boosters that carried side effects that were often worse than COVID itself, only fueled that suspicion. So the establishment media’s confidence that voters will dismiss Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because they dislike this vaccine skepticism may be whistling in the dark.

Kennedy also said something extremely interesting in his announcement that he was running: “My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency, will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now – threatening now – to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country.” Well, yes, and no one else is talking with this kind of clarity and consistency about the kind of collusion that we saw in the Twitter Files between the massive corporations and the government. Not even Donald Trump.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden administration’s attack on free speech By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/the_biden_administrations_attack_on_free_speech.html

If it weren’t for Tucker Carlson, I wouldn’t have known about a disturbing story that Glenn Greenwald broke: The Biden administration is finding ways to stifle speech supporting the Russian position in the ongoing strife in Ukraine. 

I guess I should say up front that I am neither pro-Russian nor pro-Ukrainian. I dislike both sides equally and reserve all my compassion for the innocents caught in the crossfire (including the hapless Russian conscripts). My greatest concern is the one Donald Trump articulated during his interview with Tucker Carlson, which is the fact that we’re witnessing two nuclear powers squaring off against each other—and (which Trump didn’t say) one is ruled by a megalomaniac and the other ruled (for nuclear purposes) by someone who seems to have incipient dementia. I also have no dealings with or respect for black socialists, who are usually antisemitic, too. My sole focus here is on free speech in America.

On Wednesday, Greenwald, a leftist who is also a First Amendment absolutist, tweeted that members of a Black nationalist group were just indicted for spreading pro-Russian propaganda.

Yeshitela sounds exactly like the Reverent Jeremiah Wright, doesn’t he? 

According to the DOJ press release about the indictment, charges were filed against four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals. The charge is that Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a Russian, founded something called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), which was headquartered in Russia and which the Russian government funded. He was aided by the two other Russian defendants. One of their illegal activities was to spend money to affect a candidate running for a local office in Florida.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg proposes spending $20 million taxpayer dollars on female crash test dummies By Eric Utter

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/transportation_secretary_pete_buttigieg_proposes_spending_20_million_taxpayer_dollars_on_female_crash_test_dummies.html

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has proposed that the Department of Transportation include  $20 million for female crash-test dummies in its 2024 fiscal budget. That Buttigieg — famous for his love of females though he may be — wants to spend vast sums of taxpayer dollars on feminine crash dummies seems odd in the current cultural climate in which we salute all things non-binary.

Nonetheless, Mayor Pete’s proposal has already garnered support from several House Democrats. For example, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut praised Buttigieg’s plan during a recent House Appropriations Subcommittee meeting. DeLauro stated that the use of female crash dummies would be a major step forward in the fight against “gender inequity”.

Say what? Unlike humans, who are either one sex or another, crash dummies can’t be gendered…as they are not living beings. But, in today’s world, nothing can stand in the way of insanity.

How will manufacturers make crash dummies “female?” Will they be shorter and lighter? Have big breasts and wear lipstick? Carry a purse? Will they tell the “male” crash dummies to slow down and ask for directions? This would seem kind of stereotypical and/or misogynistic in this day and age, wouldn’t it?

How can we even have female crash test dummies if we don’t even know what an actual woman is?

And who’s to say “female” crash dummies don’t identify as male? Particularly since they are arbitrarily “assigned” their gender at birth when they are made.

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Spying on the Reich’ Review: Reading Hitler’s Mind For intelligence agencies in Britain and other European countries, uncovering Nazi plans meant penetrating one man’s intentions. By Stephen Budiansky

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spying-on-the-reich-book-review-reading-hitlers-mind-6445464b?mod=article_inline

Struggling to divine Germany’s intentions in the midst of the Sudeten crisis in 1938, the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, put his finger on the fundamental point that had flummoxed conventional intelligence-gathering efforts against the Nazi government. “It is impossible to know anything for certain,” he reported to London, “in a regime where all depends on the will of a single individual whom one does not see.” The terrifying repressions of a total police state made the most innocuous efforts at penetrating the German regime’s secrets arduous and dangerous; no one seemed to know for certain who Hitler’s chief advisers were; and even those intimates were frequently caught off guard by the führer’s last-minute changes of mind, guided as much by instinct and temperament as any rational calculation. His decision to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 was made just two weeks before issuing the order to march. “We needed the secrets of a country,” recalled Czechoslovakia’s spy chief, “where people spoke in whispers.”

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Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler

In early 1939, as the world stood on the brink of war, British intelligence officials were deluged by so many contradictory rumors—Hitler was merely bluffing; Hitler would attack the East first; Hitler would begin the war within two weeks in a barrage of bombs and poison gas on London—that Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Adm. John Godfrey, observed, “Whatever happened, someone could say ‘I told you so.’ ”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wokism and History. Part Three: “The Commissariat” Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/wokism-and-history-part-three-the-commissariat/

Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany divided up Poland. Germany invaded first from the north, west, and south, the Soviet Union subsequently from the east. By early October the war was over. A victorious Germany concluded that while its forces had learned much about Blitzkrieg and needed improvement, Soviet Russia in comparison seemed inept.

That impression was solidified by the so-called “Winter War” of November 30, 1939–March 13, 1940, when the Soviets invaded neutral Finland. Although technically a victory, Russia lost nearly 500,000 dead, wounded, missing, and captured, compared to 75,000 causalities of the so-called losing Finns. Hitler concluded that his new ally Stalin’s Russia was a paper tiger, a view enhanced by the vast and continual improvement in German war-making for much of 1940–41 with the victories in Norway, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa.

Germans assumed that the Russian officer corps was largely to blame for these embarrassments, especially given that during the 1937–38 Stalin purges, some 30,000 officers were executed on the pretext of anti-Stalin, anti-communist sympathies.

Among them was over 75 percent of Soviet generals and admirals—at precisely the time Stalin was vastly expanding and modernizing his armed forces and in dire need of competent officers.

Given these exempla, Hitler turned on his ally on June 22, 1941, and foolishly invaded the vast Soviet Union. The initial three-pronged attack was stunning, and nearly knocked out the Soviet Union in the first three months of the invasion, inflicting somewhere between 4-5 million casualties, with perhaps over 2 million immediate dead. Hitler was at first convinced that Stalin had wrecked his military and Moscow would be in German hands by early September.

What followed December 1941—Hitlerian strategic blunders, German overextended logistics and manpower shortages, vast resupplies of Anglo-American Lend-Lease war material to Russia, intact Russian industrial production beyond the Urals, and improving Soviet generalship—had doomed Germans to defeat by late 1943.

By 1943 Stalin had reversed course, reviving the Russian Orthodox Church to lend religious zeal to the war, and increasingly turning over the day-to-day decision making, both tactical and strategic, to an array of talented Soviet generals, most famously Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev, Vasily Chuikov, and Konstantin Rokossovsky. Both Konev and Rokossovsky had been purged between 1936–38 but were by 1941–42 “rehabilitated.” In short, once the Soviet Union de facto ended the commissariat/ideological control of the military and allowed it to function more on the basis of military efficacy, the Soviets began to take advantage of inherent German weaknesses.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Divisive resolutions lead to political morass at World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem David Isaac

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.jns.org/divisive-resolutions-lead-to-political-explosion-at-world-zionist-congress/

Delegates to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem this week hoped for a forum to discuss the pressing issues facing world Jewry. Those hopes faded as committee meetings swirled around divisive resolutions, finally exploding on Thursday when a right-wing bloc organized a mini-rebellion.

Made up of Mizrachi, Likud, Shas and Eretz Hakodesh, the bloc put together enough signatures to force a vote by name, meaning each of the nearly 700 delegates would be called one by one for all 18 resolutions, a process that would have taken hours. The move was brought about by Mizrachi’s fear that people would cast multiple votes using other people’s clickers.

The move threw a monkey wrench into Thursday’s proceedings and completely changed the plans for Friday; the original schedule was thrown out in order to make way for a discussion of the resolutions. It was also agreed that resolutions would not be voted on during the Congress but next week electronically.

What finally set the right-wing bloc into action were resolutions against judicial reform, Orthodox conversion and changes to the Law of Return, said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, chairman of Eretz Hakadosh, a faction representing Orthodox values within the World Zionist Organization (WZO) that supports strengthening the state’s Jewish identity.

“We had a situation where the World Zionist Organization was voting against positions of the Israeli government,” he told JNS. “I’m proud that Eretz Hakodesh went in to defend the principles of Torah Judaism, of Israel, of family, and we didn’t buckle. The left and the Reform [movement] realize there is a formidable force challenging them.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Do Humanists Care about Academic Freedom? The roster of a new free-inquiry group at Harvard reveals some conspicuous absences. Joshua T. Katz

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/do-humanists-care-about-academic-freedom

On April 12, the psychologist Steven Pinker and the psychobiologist Bertha Madras announced in the Boston Globe the formation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard (CAFH), a faculty-led organization devoted to the principles of free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse. This is welcome news. After all, everyone looks up to Harvard. Unfortunately, however, all is not well at America’s oldest university. Noting that Harvard ranks 170th of 203 in FIRE’s “2023 College Free Speech Rankings,” Pinker and Madras state with depressing force that “we know of cases of disinvitation, sanctioning, harassment, public shaming, and threats of firing and boycotts for the expression of disfavored opinions. More than half of our students say they are uncomfortable expressing views on controversial issues in class.”

As I write, the CAFH has 71 members, many significant presences in academia. Among them are three university professors (Harvard’s highest rank), including former president Lawrence Summers, and all but six are tenured or tenure-track; only four are retired. As Pinker and Madras put it, “We are diverse in politics, demographics, disciplines, and opinions but united in our concern that academic freedom needs a defense team.”

Consider the diversity of disciplines. Nine of the 71 are from the law school, eight from the medical school, and five each from the schools of business and government. Along with two members each from the schools of divinity, education, and public health, plus one from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, they constitute 34—almost half—who are affiliated with Harvard’s professional schools and are not members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). One former director of admissions is also on the list. As for the remaining 36, 19 are social scientists, six are scientists, five are humanists, and another six are members of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), which is technically part of FAS, though Harvard often assesses it separately.

These figures are, at one level, not unbalanced: the total number of faculty members in the seven professional schools just mentioned (1,196) is comparable with the total in FAS plus SEAS (1,102). But at least three reasons for concern stand out.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Fred Bauer: An eminent political theorist reconsiders a word that haunts the American political debate.

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-liberal-in-all-of-us

The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective, by Michael Walzer

A prominent political theorist and longtime editor of the democratic-socialist magazine Dissent, Michael Walzer has been at the center of major intellectual debates and activist movements of the past 60 years. In his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics, Walzer fuses his longstanding interest in pluralism and his decades of activism to craft a narrative of the “liberal” that stresses flexibility, uncertainty, and diversity. Through stories about visiting Israel in the 1950s, organizing against the Vietnam War, and marching against Brexit, Walzer offers a synoptic view of a career of political involvement. And his wider account of the “liberal” illuminates conflicts about politics today, challenging some of the dichotomies of our own polarized moment.

A debate about liberalism broadly understood suffuses contemporary American political life. Some critics of liberalism—perhaps most notably, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed—argue that a liberalism of relentless autonomy has dissolved social bonds and led to an alienated misery. Others insist that liberalism should be defended from an onslaught by post-liberalism, nationalism, populism, and other supposed reactionary terrors.

Rather than conjuring some titanic clash between isms, Walzer offers a more parsimonious account of “liberal” as an adjective. Here, what is liberal is not the product of some grand ideology, nor does it necessarily lead to a single set of conclusions (as ideological narratives often do). Instead, it is marked by ambiguity, toleration, pluralism, and an acceptance of openness. That spirit of generosity is not the same as moral relativism: liberals “oppose every kind of bigotry and cruelty.” But it is marked by some acceptance of difference and an openness to correction. For Walzer, the “liberal” is not an ideology but an accent for an ideology; it is “not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.” The “liberal” is thus compatible with a wide range of ideological orientations, and the course of the book is dedicated to exploring the liberal flavors of different ideologies (all dear to Walzer’s heart): liberal democrats, liberal socialists, liberal nationalists and internationalists, liberal communitarians, liberal feminists, liberal professors and intellectuals, and liberal Jews.

In this sketch of the “liberal” as not ideologically tethered, Walzer taps into a broader tradition. Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear,” which he cites as an inspiration, argues that the core of the “liberal” is the avoidance of cruelty. Helena Rosenblatt’s more recent The Lost History of Liberalism also broadens the valence of the concept by attending to diversity and even tensions within different liberal traditions. Walzer does not discount the possibility of liberalism as an ideology; he argues that liberalism in this sense (of free trade, open borders, radical individualism, and so on) has many resonances with contemporary American libertarianism. However, he also hopes to show how “liberal” as an adjective can be compatible with a variety of other traditions and political approaches. The “liberal” supports pluralism in numerous ways.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Administration Still Negotiating a Secret ‘Deal’ with Iran: As Many Nuclear Weapons as They Like? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on April 22nd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19590/negotiating-secret-iran-nuclear-deal

Nothing seems to stop the Biden administration from wanting to reward the ruling mullahs of Iran with a nuclear deal that will pave the way for the Islamist regime of Iran legally to obtain as many nuclear weapons as it likes, empower the ruling mullahs with billions of dollars, lift sanctions against their theocratic regime, allow them to rejoin the global financial system and enhance their legitimacy on the global stage.

These benefits presumably include further enabling the regime’s ruthless expansion throughout the Middle East — Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and the terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip — and into Latin America.

“The Americans are keeping their desire to negotiate with the Islamic Republic [to revive the nuclear deal] in secret in the midst of denial and silence”. — Independent Persian, February 23, 2023.

In addition, Iran, called by the US Department of State a “top sponsor of state terrorism,” has been ratcheting up its presence and terror cells in Latin America while using the continent as a sanctuary.

During the Biden administration, the Iranian regime has also attempted to assassinate US officials on American soil.

Even The Washington Post pointed out that the attempted kidnappings should be a serious warning to the Biden administration: “The message for the Biden administration, which has frequently proclaimed its intention to defend pro-democracy dissidents, is that Iran and other foreign dictatorships won’t shrink from launching attacks inside the United States unless deterred…”

Instead, the Biden administration remains silent and evidently still wants to reward the mullahs with the nuclear deal and it continues to see “diplomacy” — read: appeasement — as the only path to deal with the Iranian regime.

Nothing…. seems to be deterring the Biden administration from trying to give the Islamist regime of Iran the ultimate gift: unlimited nuclear weapons.

Nothing seems to stop the Biden administration from wanting to reward the ruling mullahs of Iran with a nuclear deal that will pave the way for the Islamist regime of Iran legally to obtain as many nuclear weapons as it likes, empower the ruling mullahs with billions of dollars, lift sanctions against their theocratic regime, allow them to rejoin the global financial system and enhance their legitimacy on the global stage.